I’ve killed a drawing that I’ve been working on for years. This sort of thing happens a lot with me. Here is a short video about this drawing (click the link below to my youtube video to watch a short video about it).
You can find out more about this work by scrolling back through this blog or by scrolling through my wordpress drawing blog: ‘Roy Eastland Drawing’.
I’ve made some short videos about my work for my YouTube channel (“Roy Eastland – Drawing”). These are unscripted short films of me showing some work in my studio space at home and talking about my ideas.
If you’re interested in my work you can like the videos and subscribe to my YouTube channel. Here is a link to the most recent of these (please click on the link below the image to watch it):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbj1Dhzs2z4
All the best to you all!
Roy
My silverpoint drawing, ‘Empire Day’, is about to be on show in an exhibition in New York. The exhibition is called ‘The Seventh View’ and has been organised in partnership between the ING Discerning Eye and the C24 Gallery in Chelsea, New York.
My drawing is based on a small group-photograph found at an antique fair. The picture was taken in Margate in the 1930s and, judging from the presence of ‘Britannia’ in the centre of the group, the occasion is probably an ‘Empire Day’ event.
Here we see men dressed as women, people ‘blacked-up’, people made-up to look like funny foreigners and funny working-class people, and there is even a person dressed up as a member of the Klu Klux Klan! Here are people, unselfconsciously, expressing themselves in fancy dress costumes. But their choices of costumes, perhaps, express even more about the prevailing cultural attitudes of their time.
This is one of a number of drawings based on the same small photograph. Margate is presently experiencing ‘Cultural Regeneration’ and the UK is sadly leaving the EU. Any similarities between the people depicted in my drawing and anyone presently living in Margate are probably coincidental.
There are two exhibitions opening at the C24 Gallery on the 30th January: ‘You Belong Here’ (works by Orit Ben Shitrit and Nirit Takele) and ‘The Seventh View’ (exhibtion in partnership between the ING Discerning Eye and the C24 Gallery). They run until 23rd April.
The C24 Gallery is to be found at: 560 W 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
I’ve recently had a solo show as part of the ‘Margate NOW 2019’ art festival. My exhibtion was called ‘Displaced Portraits’ and consisted of thirty-three, mostly metalpoint, drawings.
I’ve always been a little unbelieving of artists who can easily say what their work is about. But for want of a better way of putting it, I think my work is about time, presence and about the careful and affectionate act of noticing things (this description will have to do for today).
The fifteen ‘Displaced Portraits’, from which the exhibition derived its name, are of people seen in photographs, taken mostly in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, which I’ve found at various times in the same Margate junk shop. These people are all unknown to me. Their photographs capture tiny moments in their lives; my drawings are a kind of meditation on those displaced traces of lives lived in central Europe during that particular time in our shared European history. I wonder how the trajectories of our lives have intersected. I wonder what it is I am really drawing here.
The Margate NOW 2019 art festival continues to run alongside the Turner Contemporary’s showing of the 2019 Turner Prize until January 2020.
You can watch some short videos of my exhibition over on my YouTube channel. See also my WordPress blog, twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages.
